Life is elsewhere

Milan Kundera is a leading Czech novelist and short story writer. Born in Brno in 1929, he studied and later was a lecturer at the Film Faculty of the Prague Drama Academy. He first became known to readers with his three books of short stories called Laughable Loves (1963,1965 and 1968); one of these stories, ‘A Game of Make-Believe’, appeared in the Penguin anthology, New Writing in Czechoslovakia (Penguin Books, 1969) and the whole collection has just been published by Alfred A. Knopf in New York. At the same time Kundera's American publisher brought out his latest work, Life Is Elsewhere, which, together with The Joke (1967) and a novel he is at present working on, forms a trilogy giving a vivid picture of life in Communist Czechoslovakia. Whereas the hero of Kundera's previous book becomes a victim of the humourless bureaucratic machine because of a harmless joke he makes on a postcard to his girl friend, Jaromil, the protagonist of Life Is Elsewhere, wrecks his girl's life in his eagerness to be accepted as an equal by the secret policeman who used to be a schoolmate of his. A romantic poet with an over-protective mother, Jaromil wholeheartedly joins the ‘revolution ‘of February 1948, which he believes will change the world. (This excerpt is taken from Part 5 of the book entitled ‘The Poet Is Jealous’.)